The Art of Speculation
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
The Art of Speculation
| Author | Philip L. Carret |
|---|---|
| Published | 1930 |
| Pages | 366 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Philip Carret’s 1930 attempt to separate speculation from gambling — treating it as the deliberate assumption of risk for profit, and working through balance sheets, bonds against equities, management, position sizing and the cycle. It pre-dates Graham and Dodd, and its author kept investing for sixty years after the crash it was published into. |
Where I heard about it
- @tylercosgrove — on his list of 25 books he offered to send to Jared Kushner, October 2025.
About this edition
The book grew out of a series of articles Carret wrote for Barron’s. He had founded the Pioneer Fund in 1928 and ran money for another six decades, which gives the book the odd status of being both a period document of the late-1920s market and the working method of an investor who survived what came next.
Connections
- Investing — the discipline the book sets out to define.
- Value Investing — Carret’s analytical method anticipates much of what Graham later codified.
- Benjamin Graham — the contemporary whose framework this book pre-dates.
- Risk — the book’s definition of speculation is built on the deliberate assumption of it.
- Market Cycles — the 1920s market Carret was writing inside of.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.